a blog about two couples buying, moving in, renovating, and living in our new home in brooklyn.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

closet demo, trash, configuring duplex, neighborhood kids

last night we started knocking a closet out of the fourth floor apartment. in the picture to the left, it's the wall that doesn't have a door in it. you should see cindy weilding a sawz-all and sledge hammer...awesome! the closet opened up into the common hallway, and appeared to have been a bathroom at some point, many, many years ago. it has an old skylight in the top of it, which should make for a nice feature for that apartment. we're making tons of dirt and dust, tearing out the plaster (yes, we're wearing dust masks), and getting rid of construction debris is going to be an issue. we bagged up a bunch of it and put it out for the garbage last night, but for some reason they didn't take it. maybe it was too heavy. or maybe we have to start service. another thing to add to the list to figure out.

here's our temporary community kitchen on the fourth floor. currently the coziest spot in the house.

all bathroom sinks are now draining properly, and two of three tub/showers are too. the fourth floor tub appears to need some drain unclogging still, which may mean we have to cut into the drywall to get to pipes. add it to the list.

we're also having lots of conversations about how we're going to configure the bottom two floors. it seems that turning it into four separate apartments will increase our taxes by a large amount. so, we're currently trying to figure out how to make the duplex (bottom two floors) more self-contained, so that they don't have to use the common hallway to access the kitchen or bedroom, etc. but, we also want to figure out how to make common access to the back yard and the basement. this may be an impossible task; the place isn't that big to begin with...but we're not giving up yet.

and we've figured out that we can't get a full-size washer/dryer into the basement of the house; the available openings are all too small.

oh, and lots of neighborhood people and their kids hang out on the street at night. they've all been very friendly to us, introducing themselves, welcoming us to the 'hood. kids seem to like to sit on our stoop all of the time, and we're trying to figure out the line between being friendly and setting boundaries. i told some of them that once we have renters, they can no longer sit there. we'll see how it goes. again, they've all been very nice to us, which is great.

a mr. softee ice cream truck comes by our place every night, music playing. this makes cindy extremely happy, but means bad things for our dieting.